Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
This post is part of my ongoing project to watch my science fiction blindspots. You can find my list of upcoming movies for this project here.
One of the crucial ingredients in good horror is pacing—and Invasion of the Body Snatchers runs through all its paces, desperately and beautifully.
This is not to say that it rushes; the first half of the runtime is spent drawing out the blueprints of the town of Santa Mira, the lives of its residents, their ordinary and happy existence—especially those of Doctor Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) and his former high school girlfriend Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter). The two reunite both too soon and too late; both are newly divorced, both are back in town after some time away; neither one can see the signs that their hometown is no longer their hometown, that their friends and family and neighbors have changed overnight, that it’s too late for them, too. They dance and drink and flirt, reveling in the time with each other that they hadn’t expected nor looked for, with no way of knowing that their newfound time and companionship will be cut short.
The first half of the movie watches these two characters sleepwalking through a transforming town unawares; the second half follows them as they run, desperate, trying to escape from their former neighbors without being detected. The tension, which has been slowly building up to this point with too-long glances and unsettling encounters with acquaintances, breaks into overdrive. Both McCarthy and Wynter sell their terror without falling into melodramatic traps: he is all set jaw and gentle skepticism until he is made aware of the danger, at which point he embodies the foolish stubborn determination of a wild animal that will not be trapped, while she remains wide-eyed, first with hope at the hint of romance with an old flame, which transforms into worry, then fear.
The direction and the editing serve the players well, too: the action is economical, surprising, and desperate, a series of chase scenes punctuated by sudden stops, an anthropomorphized rabbit hiding from the hunters in a hole, light illuminating the waiting faces of McCarthy and Wynter as they wait for their pursuers to miss them in their hunt and leave.
I can forgive the prologue and the epilogue that bookend the story, giving it a hint of hopefulness in an otherwise desperate story, because the end is still not an entirely happy one—McCarthy collapses with relief against a wall when he learns that the cavalry is coming, but his drawn face betrays his pain. His town, his neighbors, everyone he knew and loved are all gone, taken by a force that he was unable to see until too late. Even if the story is over and the authorities can stop the invasion offscreen, the trauma’s still there. The camera pauses on his face, drawing out the moment, stretching it out until after the end.
